Thursday, 30 March 2017

If you don’t care for sheer weight, repetition, or drones, stay away from this heavyweight showdown.
When Julian Brimmers approached me to put the Killing Sound radio shows together for RBMA, he generously invited me to reflect the full span of projects I had been working on, and will be working on in the future. So, Ambient Riff mirrors the work Dylan Carlson and myself had explored in L.A., in fact “Broke” from that Concrete Desert session was the track I mailed to the guitarists I invited to send me music for this particular show, as a reference, to send me suitably intense riffs. I guess I was attempting to construct a Metal stripped of its wack gloss trappings, no bad solos, no bad vocals, no bad theatre… I wanted it to feel like the heaviest rock, chopped and screwed and stretched into hypnotic scores for movies in my head that have yet to be made. Just as hearing the likes of Justin Broadrick in the Streetcleaner-era of Godflesh had cured me of my phobia against 6-string instruments (due to my Mum bombarding me with Deep Purple, Rainbow, Santana etc as a kid, lol), so it was the idea of guitar as eternally revolving dream machine, that appealed to me for this show. The people I approached here, for me, are masters of slow, and the finest purveyors of tone, who wield the axe like a brush, capable of excessive texture, fragility and violence in their impressionistic playing. They have all been doing their thing for a long time, so needless to say this set is just an extension of their research and developments. They have been melting down six strings into liquid drone for fun for years.
And as I def dig the three R’s – riff, repetition and resonance – with Ambient Riff, I wanted to put together a selection where, when you hear these tunes quietly, you can zone out horizontally, but when you turn the volume to 11, they will crush you mercilessly… The sound of rockets lifting off in slow motion, jets landing perpetually and speakers blown continuously.
So meditate on bass weight, get slayed by the mid range, and for best results wear headphones or play VERY f-ckin loud. Enjoy

So this is the last of these Killing Sound sessions. Kevin did say to me that hopefully there will be another series maybe later in the year. Fingers X'edUPDATE: Yep - just been informed by Kevin on FB that a new series has been agreed to

Moon Star by Magic Crystal Dirt by Norman WestbergMagic Crystal Dirt is a father, daughter collaboration exploring crazy sounds. Moon Star is the first track to be made public. We recorded it March 24, 2016.
credits
Mina Westberg, vocals
Norman Westberg, guitar, effects

Monday, 27 March 2017

Published in 1975 and 1976Edited by Nick Kimberley and Penny Reel with assistance from Chris Lane. I used to have these a l o n g time ago, the only two issues that were published, although Chris Lane says here:

We were going to do a third one because we all agreed at the time that 1972 had been such a classic year for reggae. We were going to do a 1972 edition of Pressure Drop and write it as though it was actually 1972: “Look at this great record from Glen Brown, Merry Up. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before”. Of course we never got round to it but Nick knew someone at Pluto Press and we actually signed a contract and got paid a very small advance to write this book about reggae. It was going to be the history of reggae and I remember at the time that I even did a thing about dub and how dubs are mixed, the track layouts, why the Studio One dubs on the albums sound the way they do because they come from 2-track tape, how the Tubby’s dubs sound the way they do because they’re using 4-track tape, and the Channel One’s…

Wednesday, 15 March 2017

Ranked by Rolling Stone's David Fricke as the 80th best guitarist of all time.Hmmm.A man who had such a distinctive style that just hit my sweet spot EVERY time he came to the solo.As Bob Quine said: "By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso."I was lucky enough to see him perform seven times with Richard Hell. The first time supporting The Clash in 1977 at The Glasgow Apollo and then the six times that The Voidoids supported Costello at the Dominion Theatre in London in 78.Maybe my old man mind is playing tricks but it was Hell and his band I paid to see at that run and every night when it came to Quine to solo (on a lot of songs that were unreleased at the time) it seemed that he took a different journey to get from A to Z in the solos every night.Sends shivers up my spine still thinking about those nights...I have in this mix tried to avoid the obvious choices and my BIG thanks go to James 'Hound' Marshall for the unreleased tracks that I liberated before the links at his blog went dead.Remember Quine any old way you want but remember him.And seriously man...80th best guitarist?

'Punk is an attitude. Suicide invented punk-their street punk thing. And then punk in England-there was a real energy,” Stewart said. “And it’s weird like when you pick up a radio wave that’s been distorted-things mutate down the line. There’s a story that reggae started in Jamaica because there was an R&B station that kept on cutting out so you got this weird rhythm. So in Bristol, we got a very idealistic take on what the Pistols and the Clash were doing.
I think I believed in it more than Strummer did.'